Ohio State Football: The flu didn’t beat OSU

There has been a lot of talk around the Ohio State football team and the sickness that went around before the game against TTUN. It was revealed that several players had the flu and had to miss practices leading up to the game. C.J. Stroud said as much.

What Stroud also seemed like he was doing was making excuses. Yes, it’s hard to play sick. No one wants to do that, especially when it’s snowing throughout the game. But it wasn’t the flu that beat Ohio State; it was Ohio State that beat Ohio State.

They came into that game woefully unprepared to stop TTUN on the defensive side of the ball. TTUN ran it down their throat with no regard to what the Buckeyes were doing. That doesn’t happen because you have the flu. That happens because your coaches didn’t do their jobs.

That should hopefully be fixed with a new defensive coordinator for next season. We’ll see if that ends up being the case or not. What Buckeye fans can’t do is explain away a loss like that to sickness. It was just a small factor in the game and wasn’t the main reason they lost.

I don’t like that Stroud, a leader on this team, is trying to make it an excuse. He said he wasn’t making it an excuse, but he brought it up several times. I wish he would just own the loss and work hard so it doesn’t happen again. Everyone makes mistakes, you just have to learn from them.

We’ll see just how much the Ohio State football program has learned from its mistakes once the Rose Bowl rolls around. That will give us the first glimpse of how this team might look heading into next season. Next season will once again be full of hope.